The silence surrounding Central Pylon 00 was total.
Fifty thousand mortal soldiers held their breath across two leagues of plain. Behind the locked star-iron shields of the vanguard, Captain Wu and his officers stood motionless as statues, their eyes fixed on the solitary giant standing before the white green jade monolith. Even the wind seemed to die away, as if nature itself were waiting for the crash of mortal mass and divine stonework.
Tie Shan stood alone before the three-inch white chalk circle, his boots planted thirty inches apart on the cold marble.
Beneath his ox-hide harness, the giant’s breathing slowed, deepening into the slow, steady beat of a forge bellows. In his veins, there was not a single drop of spiritual Qi. No golden core, no nascent soul, and no enchanted bloodline. What flowed through Tie Shan’s flesh was forty years of physical labor, dense stringy muscle. The old family marrow deep ring of the twenty-one-ton star-iron totem planted on Mount Taiyi.
He slowly raised the fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar, bringing the weapon back over his right shoulder.
The star-white-gold bands along the shaft caught the pale moonlight. It shone with the cold, unbending promise of mortal metalworking. His bandaged hands, blistered from grounding two hundred thousand volts of sky lightning, tightened around the leather-wrapped grip. The pain in his palms was intense, but to Tie Shan, physical pain was merely a measurement of contact with reality. A proof that he was alive and standing on sovereign earth.
